A winter feast of British chamber music

A festival of British chamber music at the Royal Northern College in Manchester was a pastoral delight, but with muscle

O Albion, the 12th January chamber-music festival at the Royal Northern College, in Manchester, was devoted to British work ranging back to Handel and Purcell, but took its title from a movement in a recent addition to the string-quartet repertory, Thomas Adès's Arcadiana. Versions of Arcady is, of course, a rubric under which much British music could be discussed; and it was an interesting gesture to take the Adès as a starting point, since, in its urbane way, it seems to toy with the pastoral tradition before happily letting the whole nostalgic thing evaporate.

It was performed by the young, impressive Navarra Quartet, whose leader took time to explain each of the seven stylised movements, implying that the piece was a special case, testing not only for players, but for the audience. And though it poses no difficulty of a conventionally avant-garde variety, and has an alluring, often tonal surface,